Monday was all about the big hole. Up early at 5ish we drove up to Yavapai Point/Overlook to watch the sunrise, which wasn't as impressive as it could be due to where it came up and the air pollution. It's terrible in the Canyon, blowing in from California and other places to give everything a gauzy haze that was completely unexpected. The park has a laser set up to shoot to a telescope on the opposite rim to determine the visibility at the moment.

After breakfast at El Kabong Hotel on the rim (sorry, El Tovar, but I sang Quickdraw McGraw's alter-ego's name all morning), we packed up the car and left it so we could hike. Up hill along the canyon about three miles, we got a great view of the mule riders entering the canyon and the huge ravens dancing on the updrafts. And rocks. Lots and lots of rocks.

(Arizona trivia for you: the Canyon is made by water, but most other rocks like around Sedona are sandstone ground down by wind. Squished Frog Productions: as much about education as it is about my bullshit.)

The drive out the park was uneventful but for watching a couple of deer butting horns. We shopped at the general store which doubles as a gift shop and got some gifts for people (my nephews are getting a bag of fool's gold). We hit a couple more overlooks (Moran Point!), ending with the Watchtower at Desert View. By then, even the wife was admitting that our pictures were all going to look much the same if we didn't hurry up and label them.

We drove on to Cameron, site of the big Indian Trading Post store/restaurant/hotel were we had reservations for the night. This is where I made my biggest mistake of the vacation: I had fried chicken for dinner.

Tuesday morning, Halloween, and we were up early for breakfast and a quick getaway to our destination for the day, Monument Valley, Utah, home of some of the best buttes and spires you've ever seen.

But I was already feeling it. The rebellion of my digestive tract.

Much like when my genius dog Caper drank from a bucket of congealed oil previously used to fry a turkey -- and would no doubt do it again in a heartbeat despite the immediate negative effects -- I am the same way with fried food. My stomach hasn't been right since I got here, but did I take it easy? Smart? Safe? Nope, I went for the one food guaranteed to throw my colon into a greasy uproar.

I've never felt greater sympathy for a woman's time-o'-the-month cramps. My abdomen has been clenching like a vise every half hour or so for the last six hours. I was worried enough about it that, rather than risk ruining it for everyone, I skipped out on taking the 3.5 hour around the valley. I made the wife go however. Someone should be able to look at this spot. Luckily, I can see five or six beautiful buttes from my hotel room window here at Goulding's (home of John Wayne's Cabin... I think it was a set in a movie he shot here, not really a place he stayed).

Buttes and Pepto-bismol are my friends.

(Butte trivia: Mesas become buttes when they get small. Buttes can become spires when really small. Spires, I guess, fall over and become rocks.)

There's a Wi-Fi connection down in the lobby so I may go post this [obviously]. I can't take a nap, as the people in the room up stairs are apparently moving all of their furniture. Plus, the Dawn of the Dead remake is on and I am kind of obsessed with guessing what curse words they're saying that the USA network is not bleeping or redubbing, but just silencing.

Tomorrow, hopefully I'll have passed all the evil from my body and can get back to the vacationing proper when we go to Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de-shay for some strange reason). And also, of course, it's November 1. And we all know what that means.

Saturday night (night 4) we had a romantic dinner in the weirdest place, a Greek restaurant called Fournos which would only seat people at 6pm and 8pm. I can't fathom why that's good for business, but what do I know. We were still taking pictures of Cathedral Rock at six, so 8pm it was. We pulled up and thought the place was closed. We walked in and found the dark little place open, and the wife of the owner there to greet us. She looked like Madeline Albright, but had the personality of Mrs. Costanza from Seinfeld, though friendlier. She called us Mr. and Mrs. Griffin and led us to an empty table, which wasn't hard, because they were all empty. She made us hold up the white board with the menu on our table and walked away, chattering to us the whole time. The food was great though, albeit a bit lacking in the presentation department (garnish was a lime wedge), but I can get over that. What I couldn't get over: they only offered one desert choice, and it had nothing with the all-important syllables "choc" or "late" in it. We split rather than have their jellied sponge cake or whatever it was and bought some cake at a Safeway and ate it in the hotel room and fell asleep watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the Potter book I didn't like but the movie I've seen the most as it always seems to be on HBO when I turn it on during the day).

Sunday morning we skipped the free continental breakfast in the hotel (which have been quite good) and went to the highly recommended Coffee Pot Restaurant . It's named after a rock formation called Coffeepot, which looks like and old-timey cowboy percolator. It's famous for having 101 omelet variations on the menu. I had a number 19: bacon. Because I'd usually just have scrambled eggs and bacon anyway. I was fine with mine, but the Wife was unimpressed with number 18 (asparagus, cheddar, tomato) and the icky hash browns. She plans to inform TripAdvisor.com the spot is not all that as we were lead to believe.

Our drive up to the Grand Canyon Village was interrupted by an hour stop at an Indian jewelry/gift store called Garlands where she bought a couple of items. Once we climbed another 1,000 feet of altitude out of the already high level (Sedona is 5,200 feet above seal level) we hit Flagstaff. Found a Target and bought a FM transmitter for our iPods. I didn't bring mine on the trip, assuming I would use the cassette adapter. But our rented Ford Taurus actually has a CD player. Outwitted by technology again.

I've felt better today than any day since we've arrived -- no stomach aches or nausea. It was instead the Wife's turn. We skipped lunch and I should have known better -- much like our eldest dog Siren, when she goes without a meal she gets ill. We pulled into the Canyon Park and went to the first overlook we could park at. And as we gazed over the railing, I was informed that she was going to yak if we didn't do something. What I should do was unclear. Feed her? Let her lay down? Hope she'd throw up in the car and be done with it? She had nothing in her stomach to toss up, so I went for the lay down. We checked into our room at the Maswik Lodge (one of many lodgings here at the South Rim, all owned by the same company ) and she took a nap while I went for a walk and found us only about a tenth of a mile from the rim itself, as well as a restaurant in the Bright Angel Lodge.

Once the wife -- whom I would call Squanauseous, but she would punch me. Hard. -- was recovered, we walked over, had some foodstuffs, and walked east along the rim to take many, many pictures of the Big Hole many call Grand. And it is. However, I was distracted. For during the eating of foodstuffs, I had three glasses of water and two diet Cokes in an effort to hydrate. Hydration has been priority one for me since my first Arizona induced tummy-ache. And it worked too well today, because my bladder was bursting.

The paved trail along the rim is great, but not exactly flush with toilets. After three quarters of a mile of my bitching and moaning, she had enough and ordered me into the woods. Mind you, these woods are desert scrub, not exactly dense, but I couldn't avoid it. I scampered into the woods, hiding behind junipers until I found a spot where, doing a 360, I could see no one. Thus logic dictated no one could see me.

So I took a whiz on Grand Canyon National Park.

A proud moment.

Considering that I did the same thing yesterday while hiking around Bell Rock, maybe I can go for the hat trick and piss on Monument Valley.

[This is my 1,100 blog entry. Woo. Hoo.]

It's true, we did hike. We started out on the Bell Rock Loop this morning, a four mile, two hour trek that actually goes around Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte, and it absolutely kicked my ass. I've been walking two hour up and down hill walks for months and this should have been easy, but this altitude and dryness are dragging me down. (That's my story and I'm sticking with it.)

From there we drove south then north again, a bit out of our way it turns out, to finally go to Tuzigoot, another abandoned indian pueblo. Also abandoned in the 1400s, just like at Montezuma's Castle. Isn't it obvious they were taken by aliens? Where is the expose movie on this?

Tuzigoot was on the way to Jerome, AZ, a former mining town turned into an artist town. We didn't stop for much (except to look at a cool store filled with copper items, and met the proprietor used to live in Romulus, NY, near Ithaca, when he was in the Army), but we did go to the Gold King Mine and Ghost Town.

If you ever have the desire to visit it, you should just go to a rural junk yard, drop $4 on the ground some where, and look at all the abandoned cars. (There was a donkey though. He was nice.)

Finally, we went for another hike at a park in the shadow of Cathedral Rock, a big monster stone formation in the southwest part of Sedona. The park goes along a river, and felt a lot like the dog park we used to walk in near Northampton, MA, maybe because there were so many off-leash dogs.

Tonight, we're off tonight to have a massive greek meal. I do this and blog instead of watching Hellboy: Storm of Swords in its Cartoon Network premiere. That'd dedication people.

More Rocks

I'm not usually the kind of guy who likes to spend $200+ on something I can't carry around. iPods and laptop batteries and even gas for the lawn mower is one thing... but spending that much on a meal or "treatment" or "experience" always gives me immense pause. I mean, fine, I got the massage or saw the views or ate the food, but is a memory enough? Don't I want to play with/wear/sleep in/abuse/love whatever cost me that much?

This morning the wife and I did just that, spent well over $200 to take a three hour tour in Pink Jeep. And it was well worth it. It could have sucked if we'd cheaped out and gone for the "spectacular view" only tour, but we went for their Broken Arrow tour (named after the 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart that was filmed here in Sedona, AZ). And it was a doozy of a ride. They take these tricked out jeeps -- painted pink, natch -- up and down rocks and trails that no vehicle should be capable of traversing. The only thing missing was a grappling hook gun to pull us up the cliff like a pink Batmobile filled with tourists. Pics are up on my Flickr account (as well as some from yesterday's stop at Montezuma's Castle, which don't do the cliff dwelling justice, as the picks make it look like a scale model.)

Now I really wish we'd spent a ridiculous amount on a massage today, because my neck is killing me after that ride....

After the tour, we shopped downtown followed by lunch at Red Planet Diner. Cool decor with generic aliens and space ships hanging from the ceiling, even if the food was pretty much standard diner fair. Now we're back at the hotel and the wife is napping. I may join her.

The plan later tonight is to watch the sunset from the Sedona Airport hangar site, supposedly the best spot in town. We'll follow that with home made ice cream at one of the many such places in the commercial area of town, and maybe take in a movie. I wish Borat was playing here, but no such luck. Probably we'll just go to bed early... for tomorrow, we hike.

Why are their so many palm trees planted around Phoenix? They're obviously not native. Tho it does make the city feel a LOT like you are driving around in Florida, so maybe that's why.

Driving north out of Phoenix to go see Montezuma's Castle (which had nothing to do with Montezuma, by the way, it just got named by some ignorant schmuck in the 1800s who found it) we noticed that the terrain changes dramatically every few miles. It starts with the big cacti, moves to scrub brush, even a whole area of nothing but conifer trees (at least that's what they looked like) before coming upon grass lands (with a few cacti). I don't know if that happens in the northeast... maybe it does and I don't notice.

I spent the night last night feeling sick in waves, figuring I had some bad mexican for lunch yesterday. The wife (whom I call Squanto) says I'm dehydrated already. We luckily bought bottles of water at Safeway last night and I had one for pre-breakfast. Time now to go down to the lovely Hampton Inn continental breakfast. This morning we're off for a rousing tour of the Sedona area in a Pink Jeep, and later today we'll either for for a hike, get a massage, go to a movie (they show westerns downtown made here in the area), or all three. But i'm skipping the mexican food today just in case.

Oh, and the wife now has enough underwear to make it through the vacation without doing any laundry, thanks to the surfeit of outlet villages in this state.

Here we are at the SpringHill Suites in Tempe, the day after traveling. Time for continental breakfast and then we drive up to Jerome and then Sedona for a few days of shopping and relaxing and maybe a spa.

Highlights so far: I reclaimed all my good karma when sitting in the center seat on the plane yesterday with women on either side of me -- neither was my wife, she was stuck somewhere else (thanks NorthWest Airlines!). The woman at the window was grossly overweight and what's more had a one year old toddler squirming and yelling for more than half the four hour ride from Detroit to Phoenix. I gladly held the babe while mom tried to pick up her dropped binky/sippy cup/cookie/toys and never said an unkind world. When we exited, she said, "thanks for putting up with us," and I said it was no big deal. Actually, the kid was no problem. But I had to sit sideways against her bulk, which sucked.

Best yet: this morning my wife discovered she neglected to pack any underpants. At all. I've told her she's tuck with what she wore on the plane for the next 11 days. Or she goes commando. (Needless to say, first stop today is probably a Victoria's Secret, if not a Wal-Mart.)

Today is my wedding anniversary. I spent it cleaning up the backyard, half-heartedly helping my wife plant flower (in October?!) and mowing the lawn. Oh, and I yelled at a little old lady.

She cut us off in traffic, which is not the greatest of transgressions I know, but it was so blatant, so ridiculous -- the lines indicating the traffic pattern in that spot are less than three weeks old -- that I followed her into the lot in the mall. She knew she fucked up -- first words out of her mouth are, "Haven't you ever made a mistake?" Part of me wishes I'd just left it at that and thanked her for admitting her fault... but she wasn't really apologizing, just rationalizing, so I told her "Not one that every almost killed anyone!" (Which isn't true I suppose of anyone who's driven in New Jersey on the MassPike). She just walked away knowing I would not listen to her "reason." To her back, I called her a "freak."

Not my proudest moment, but I can't say I feel bad about it. What I wish I'd said, was, "Yeah, just walk away, Granny! Lets hope you can walk away when your driving gets someone maimed!"

I'm starting to think I have anger management issues. But I'll punch anyone in the face who tells me that! Freaks.

I can't get this to embed, but you can view the awesomeness here.

I didn't know this. But now I do, and it just makes Jim Henson seem even cooler.

Flesh Flicks: "Mahna Mahna" - via Fleshbot:

Most Americans under the age of 40 are probably familiar with the "Mahna, Mahna" song, made famous in this country by its association with odd-looking Muppets. However, not all of them are aware that it is an actual song, written by Italian musician Piero Umiliani. Fewer still realize that the song made its first appearance in "Sweden, Hell and Heaven," a softcore movie about nude lesbian saunas.

Click the link and you even get to see the clip from the movie.

Is it just me, or are women better looking today? Maybe it's the hair.

My bestest buddy Joe and his beautiful wife Andrea joined us for a long weekend last. We drove around, walked up Watkins Glen, and went to wineries (because that's what you do with out of towners.) Joe and I would probably have been happy just watching funny shit on TV, and luckily we did that: South Park for instance. And the two hour opener of Battlestar Galactica. (Currently the best show on the air, even over LOST. It's so frakkin' true.)

As we were leaving a winery, I got pulled over by the local law enforcement pro. I had no idea why -- I wasn't even back on the main road yet. I figured he was checking sobriety, but I (for this trip at least) was not drinking so I could drive. He claimed I didn't use my right turn signal and they'd had a rash of accidents in the area due to lack of signals. I doubted it, but didn't tell him that, of course. It did give us fodder for a running gag the rest of the day about signalling and not signalling. Ah, good times.

Anyway, once they left on Monday, it was back to the grind, which just made me depressed and neurotic and bummed so much that not much has lifted my spirits. I have to dive headlong back into my novel with many more changes to create a third draft (thanks Josh!) The will now include a brand new character who I like to think of as the "chronic victim" -- so I can finish my outline for the sequel and write that during November. Which I'm looking forward to (the November stuff, not so much the rewrites, though I'm kinda jazzed by the new character, who came to me at 2:30am Thursday and wouldn't leave me alone until I went to the computer and wrote about him). Even though its a butt load of work.

More coherent thoughts later.

Was it missing? Yes. It was, even if only my uncle Dave noticed.

You don't care about this, but I'm going to tell you anyway. The Squished Frog Blog was down for the count since Oct. 4 when I made the mistake of trying to upgrade the software that runs it. I blame this on my (now former) webhost company, Your-Site.com, which dropped a note to me saying my site had been moved to a new server, that I needed to update the path to perl in my scripts, etc. I did that, and it worked. But I figured, "what the hell, I'm in here tinkering, I should upgrade to the latest greatest version of Movable Type..."

Big mistake.

It might have worked, but the site was wonky... this could have been the install I did, or more likely it was Your-Site's servers. I'd had it with those jokers about 18 months ago after another email outtage that took days to fix. But I was too lazy to make a switch to a new host.

No longer. The problem was, I tried a host that I only after the fact found out would not let me use things like, oh, FTP, to install Movable Type. Then they told me, to run it, I had to upgrade the service I'd bought. Screw that. I jumped ship over to GoDaddy, which was who I wanted to try in the first place, because they have great Superbowl commercials.

After the always fun antics of switching my DNS to point to the new servers -- something I'm also switching to GoDaddy pretty soon -- I spend some hours today putting MT on the GoDaddy servers. Which worked fine... except my database of entries for the blog was apparently munged. Ker-fludged. Slam-danged. Done. I had to re-import my backup. It seems to be working... though, of course, I lost ALL the comments of the last two years. I thought they were part of the backup, but no such luck. Comments are there! I should really check these things before I post...

I told you you didn't want to know any of this. "Just make it work!" you say. And I agree. But do me a solid and surf about randomly and tell me if you see anything furtherly frakked up. Comment here or send an email. Maybe you'll win a prize*.

*You will not win a prize.